Month: August 2017

If we’re going to have robots acting as tour guides and delivering pizzas then they need to be able to navigate through busy pedestrian environments, and that’s exactly what a new robot built by MIT has been programmed to do. The polite droid even knows the social norms of pedestrian movement, and will overtake on

As a researcher who works on fruit flies, I often get asked how to get them out of someone’s kitchen. This happens to fly researchers often enough that we sit around fly conferences (these actually exist) and complain about getting asked this question. Meanwhile, we watch the same fruit flies buzz around our beers instead

Environmentalists are celebrating after a Brazilian court blocked an attempt by the country’s president to allow mining in a massive protected reserve in the Amazon rainforest. Brazilian president Michel Temer sparked outrage last week when he issued a decree abolishing a protected area called the National Reserve of Copper and Associates (aka Renca) to open

Physicists have finally observed a quantum interaction between a group of four entangled electrons. Until now, this interaction was purely theoretical, but now it’s been caught in action by cleverly cooling a superconducting crystal and stressing it under high pressure. The results of this exciting experiment are now opening doors to further refining our knowledge of

We’re used to seeing bats and whales use echolocation to find their way around. And for a while now we’ve known that, with practise, humans can also visualise their surroundings by making clicking sounds. A new study presents the first detailed description of human echolocation, including the acoustic characteristics and spatial range of mouth clicks.

A prey-killing mechanism so imperceptibly deadly it evolved at least five times in different kinds of ants has been caught on camera by scientists – just barely. Myrmoteras, a rarely seen genus of trap-jaw ants from South-East Asia, snap their jaws shut on unsuspecting prey at speeds of up to 80 kilometres per hour (50

In the beginning, there was darkness. And then, after hundreds of millions of years, light from primitive suns spilled freely across the Universe. What caused the lifting of this veil, however, has been something of a mystery. Now astronomers have developed a new hypothesis to explain how that primeval fog was pushed aside, allowing light

What seemed to be a new star blazed into existence on March 11, 1437. The galactic newcomer was witnessed by Korean royal astronomers, among the few people taking notes about the stars in the early 15th century. They recorded the spot in the night sky and reported that 14 days later, the flare vanished from its perch in the constellation Scorpius.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, researchers searching the Universe for signs of alien life detected 15 explosive radio signals in the space of just five hours, all coming from a tiny galaxy 3 billion light-years away. It’s the same galaxy we’ve received repeated signals from in the past, but the blasts, known as

Highly narcissistic men feel emotional distress rather than delight when viewing pictures of themselves, according to new research, which may help us understand how narcissism works in our social media age. Narcissism – essentially being your own biggest fan, to an unhealthy extent – is most often seen as a negative and egocentric characteristic, but

Like a puddle under hot sunshine, the world’s largest inland body of water is shrinking in the face of heat – in this case, a scorching climate the modern world has never before seen. The Caspian Sea, which lies between Europe and Asia, has been slowly evaporating over the past two decades due to rising

The 4th International Conference on Quantum Technologies held in Moscow last month was supposed to put the spotlight on Google, who were preparing to give a lecture on a 49-qubit quantum computer they have in the works. A morning talk presented by Harvard University’s Mikhail Lukin, however, upstaged that evening’s event with a small announcement

Researchers have shown that crystals can be so flexible they can be bent repeatedly and even tied up in knots, overhauling our current understanding of the structures, and challenging the very definition of a crystal. As we learnt in school, crystals are brittle and inelastic – if you try to bend a crystal of rock

An experimental conservation project that was abandoned and almost forgotten about, has ended up producing an amazing ecological win nearly two decades after it was dreamt up. The plan, which saw a juice company dump 1,000 truckloads of waste orange peel in a barren pasture in Costa Rica back in the mid 1990s, has eventually

A two-step cooling process using lasers has allowed physicists to push molecules of calcium monofluoride down to a record low temperature, busting a barrier that until now has been impassable. Decades ago, chilling individual atoms to near absolute zero opened a new world of research for particle physicists. This latest breakthrough could also provide fertile

While millions across the continental US turned their eclipse glasses to the sky to watch the Sun disappear behind the Moon last Monday, NASA scientists took to the skies to get a much broader view of the event. They’ve now released a few of their images taken from 15,240 metres (50,000 feet), including a spectacular

Scientists have discovered evidence that galactic magnetic fields form early on in a galaxy’s life and then stay relatively stable, based on observations of another galaxy around 5 billion light-years away from our part of the cosmos. The magnetic field around this galaxy is similar in strength and configuration to our own Milky Way, and

Palaeontologists have identified the largest ‘sea dragon’ of its kind in the fossil record, after discovering the mislabelled remains of an ancient ocean dweller from 200 million years ago. The specimen, the largest representative of the Ichthyosaurus genus on record, was a kind of marine reptile commonly taken to be a swimming dinosaur – but

Rejecting a plea from manufacturers that the production of plastic bags creates jobs, Kenya’s high court on Monday paved the way for the world’s strongest ban on plastic bags to come into full effect. The law, representing Kenya’s third attempt at a ban in the past decade, comes with harsh penalties. For now, they

Black holes are the most intense and mysterious cosmic phenomena in the Universe, and new research shows we understand even less about them than we thought we did. A long-standing assumption about the physics taking place in the space immediately surrounding these matter-consuming voids has been found to be incorrect, and the discovery could derail

If you’re hanging out feverishly to find out what happens after this weeks’ drama-filled season seven finale of Game of Thrones, you’re not alone – with the TV show now firmly ahead of the books, fans might have to wait until 2019 to see how George R.R. Martin’s epic saga wraps up. So to give us

Residents of the Houston area affected by Hurricane Harvey have spotted an unusual risk in the floodwaters: colonies of fire ants that have joined together to form floating rafts. Fire ants are an invasive species native to South America, and they have successfully colonised the southern US. Whenever a major storm blows through, bringing flooding,

Ever since Elon Musk shared his blueprints for the hyperloop – a revolutionary transport system that has the potential to shuttle humans at speeds of more than 1,200 km/h (746 mph) – the engineering community has been in overdrive, with hyperloop prototypes popping up all over the place. And now Musk has put up

Ever since Elon Musk shared his blueprints for the hyperloop – a revolutionary transport system that has the potential to shuttle humans at speeds of more than 1,200 km/h (746 mph) – the engineering community has been in overdrive, with hyperloop prototypes popping up all over the place. And now Musk has put up footage

Tesla’s Powerwall was intended to provide a convenient way for homeowners to store electricity for future use, such as when the power goes out. But with a US$5,500 price tag, they haven’t been affordable for many consumers. Some who had been interested in the tech, however, decided to try to make their own. It turns

For the first time, scientists have predicted the activity of a comet based on observations of its trailing meteoroids – and in doing so have solved the mystery of how a meteor shower called the Phoenicids was barely seen from Earth for almost 60 years. Unlike some of the particularly famous annual meteor showers enjoyed by stargazers

After not seeing the light of day for at least 30 years, a unique collection of letters by famous mathematician Alan Turing has been found in a storage space at his old university. Wrapped in a plain paper folder and tucked at the back of an old filing cabinet, the 148 never-before seen documents include

The journey to harvest hallucinogenic honey produced by Himalayan giant honey bees is far from easy. In eastern Nepal, select members of the Kulung people scale bamboo rope ladders up 300-foot (91 metre) cliffs to get it. They ward off swarms of the bees with smoke from burning grass, which is attached to a pole,

Chinese scientists have successfully sent information between entangled particles through sea water, the first time this type of quantum communication has been achieved underwater. In this proof-of-concept experiment, information was sent across a 3.3-metre (10.8-foot) long tank of seawater, but the researchers predict they should be able to use the same technique to send unhackable

As a major hurricane has made landfall in the United States for the first time since 2005, we may be fated for another debate about how climate change does, and doesn’t, affect these kinds of events. It would be strange to ignore the role of a changing climate when it comes to hurricanes, because they themselves

You know what sounds pretty great? Finding out that you’ve won the US$700 million Powerball jackpot. The lump sum minus taxes yields about US$293 million to play with, depending on where you live. Divide that by two or three to account for multiple winners, and it’s still a ton of money. Buying a ticket may not

Space can be hell, especially for delicate hardware. So when vital instruments need to run like clockwork, sometimes clockwork is actually the solution. NASA is taking a close look at a design for an off-world rover that’s more Mad Max than Star Trek, one that relies on old fashioned mechanics to make calculations under intense

Humans have been fascinated with stars for thousands of years, so it’s no surprise that we keep wanting to make taller and taller buildings that stretch towards them. There will eventually come a point where we can no longer build a taller building – but what is that point? As the new video by

In another sign of our warming world, a Russian tanker has completed an Arctic trip from Norway to South Korea in record time, becoming the first ship to cross the Northern Sea Route (NSR) without the aid of an icebreaker vessel travelling ahead. Although that’s partly due to shrinking ice coverage, the Christophe de Margerie

The pulling power of the world’s strongest resistive magnet now stands at 41.4 teslas, thanks to the efforts of scientists at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (or MagLab), part of Florida State University. Taking two-and-a-half years and $3.5 million in funding to build, the magnet smashed the previous record of 38.5 teslas earlier this

A brief-but-haunting video released by NASA on Thursday night shows Hurricane Harvey’s powerful churn toward central Texas, where the slow-moving storm is expected to throttle coastal communities with high winds and up to 25 inches (63 cm) of rain. The footage was captured just after 6pm by cameras aboard the International Space Station, not long

A twisted fibre made of gel-coated carbon nanotubes could be the very thing we need to steal energy from our surroundings that would otherwise go to waste. Threads of a material dubbed “twistron” have already shown incredible promise in the laboratory, but could one day be built into power harvesters that collect the energy equivalent

DNA sequencing technology is helping scientists unravel questions that humans have been asking about animals for centuries. By mapping out animal genomes, we now have a better idea of how the giraffe got its huge neck and why snakes are so long. Genome sequencing allows us to compare and contrast the DNA of different animals

A Dutch energy company has just embarked on a series of experiments testing the use of molten thorium salts in producing power from nuclear fission, the first of their kind since the early 1970s. It’s still early days, but the use to thorium as an alternative to uranium could provide a cleaner, safer fuel source

A team of scientists led by Mario Sucerquia at the University of Antioquia in Colombia have suggested a new explanation for the irregular dips in brightness of the star K8462852, since it recently resumed its unusual behaviour. The mysterious shift in stellar opacity could be the signature of a transiting Saturn-like exoplanet. “[W]e study the dynamics of a tilted exoring […] to

Tropical Storm Harvey is gaining power in the Gulf of Mexico, threatening to turn into a hurricane as it nears the Texas coast. The National Hurricane Center expects Harvey to hit the southern flank of Texas as a “major hurricane” on Friday night, with wind speeds topping 65 mph (105 km/h). Once the storm

We’re seeing incredible scientific discoveries being made every day, but new research indicates there’s a pretty huge gap in our knowledge when it comes to our own bodies – it turns out more than 99 percent of the microbes inside us are currently unknown to science. Researchers have long known that our bodies play host

We shouldn’t have to tell you this, but if you see signs telling you to stay off the museum exhibits, then stay off them: an 800 year-old coffin on display at Prittlewell Priory Museum in Southend in the UK has been damaged after being knocked off its stand by a clambering child. According to CCTV

In early July, Google announced that it will expand its commercially available cloud computing services to include quantum computing. A similar service has been available from IBM since May. These aren’t services most regular people will have a lot of reason to use yet. But making quantum computers more accessible will help government, academic and

Controversy around the Dakota Access Pipeline continues with the latest news that the company behind the oil pipeline is now suing Greenpeace and other environmental groups who were involved in extensive protests against the project. On Tuesday, Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) filed a federal lawsuit, alleging the dissemination of “materially false and misleading information” about

Almost three quarters of the world’s countries could be powered entirely by renewable energy sources by 2050 – if we want it badly enough, that is. That’s according to an ambitious new 2050 roadmap that calculates a move to an emissions-free future would create millions of jobs, cut trillions in health and climate costs, and

The world’s largest manufacturer of rubber bands is making its main product immortal. Alliance Rubber Co., a 94-year-old company based out of Alliance, Ohio, has announced a new partnership with British researchers to infuse graphene into its rubber bands. The rubber bands could transform how food travels through supply chains, simplify the shipment of

Time to keep a close eye on the LIGO announcement schedule, folks, because if rumours are to be believed, we might be in for a big gravitational wave announcement very soon. At this stage, we’re in the realm of speculation – nothing has been officially confirmed or denied. But there are pretty exciting hints out

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